Modern telecommunication service providers generate much of their revenue by selling propriety wireless communication services and devices to their customers, under the good-faith assumption that these services and devices will be utilized in accordance with their intended purposes. For example, a particular telecommunication service provider may allow access to its wireless communication services by selling customers a prepaid or a postpaid, i.e., subscription-based, rate plan, which is generally associated with a respective customer's service level agreement. A telecommunication service provider can also require its customers to purchase corresponding, provider-specific communication devices, including cellular phones, personal digital assistants, tablet computers, and the like, in order to access its proprietary communication services.
Further, telecommunication service providers and mobile device manufacturers enter into lucrative business agreements that contractually bind select manufacturers' products to a particular service provider. In practice, these agreements are based on many important real-world considerations, including a service provider's customer-base, existing market share, forecast device sales, amongst many other factors. However, these mutually beneficial business relationships can be negatively impacted by customer deviations from both expected service usage and retail device purchases. Accordingly, it is important for service providers and affiliated device manufactures to collaborate with each other, in order to ensure that both contracting parties are able to achieve their independent and collective business objectives, in view of these types of consumer anomalies.
Adding to the problem of unanticipated customer deviations, many tech-savvy consumers have contrived new ways to frustrate the business and marketing objectives of both telecommunication service providers and device manufacturers, by employing both software and hardware work-arounds or hacks, which enable them to gain unauthorized access to telecommunication services and devices. This subset of consumers has been able to bypass security measures employed in proprietary communication devices of an affiliated telecommunication service provider, as well as to acquire unaffiliated, generic/unlocked devices, to avoid purchasing services and products from their respective telecommunication service provider.
For example, some telecommunication device users execute unauthorized software to breach certain security features of their respective device, in order to gain root-level access to their device's operating system (OS). Achieving this OS-level access allows a user to download additional applications, extensions, and themes that are not approved by the device's authorized service provider and/or media content provider(s). This misuse of a carrier-locked communication device is sometimes referred to in the industry as “jail-breaking” a device, and it can allow an unlocked, jail-broken device to gain access to unauthorized services of multiple telecommunication service providers.
Another example of a common hardware hack that has been employed by some telecommunication device users is to purchase an after-market product known as a “SIM-shim,” which is a thin circuit board that is designed to fit between a service provider's Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card and a telecommunication device's SIM socket. The SIM-shim device can be employed to allow a user to unlock his or her carrier-locked device, by simply inserting this add-on component into his or her device, thereby effectuating an override of device security features intended to keep the device restricted to services of a specific telecommunication service provider.
As would be understood by those skilled in the art, SIM cards enable a telecommunication service subscriber to be identified on a corresponding service provider's network by storing a unique International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) that can be retrieved and subsequently authenticated over-the-air by a corresponding service provider, each time a user device engages in communications with its telecommunication service provider. A SIM IMSI generally includes the following information: a Mobile Country Code (MCC), a Mobile Network Code (MNC), and a Mobile Subscriber Identification Number (MSIN). This information allows a user's provider-issued SIM card to be identified, registered, and authenticated with an issuing telecommunication service provider.
Modern SIM cards are sold “as is,” meaning they are both static and rate plan specific, as their IMSI data cannot be modified after issuance. For this reason, each time a customer purchases a new telecommunication device or a new service plan offering from its service provider, the customer may be issued a different SIM card that must be added to the customer's existing user account at the service provider. Additionally, most SIM cards typically comprise only enough on-device memory to store static IMSI data along with minimal user contact information, such as a small number of important subscriber contact phone numbers.